Go to a small liberal-arts college if you can. I n the waning heat of last summer, freshly back in my office at a major research university, I found myself considering the higher-education hellscape that had lately descended upon the nation. I'd spent months reporting on the Trump administration's attacks on universities for, speaking with dozens of administrators, faculty, and students about the billions of dollars in cuts to public funding for research and the resulting collapse of " college life ."At Initially, I surveyed the situation from the safe distance of a journalist who happens to also be a career professor and university administrator. I saw myself as an envoy between America's college campuses and its citizens, telling the stories of the people whose lives had been shattered by these transformations. By the summer, though, that safe distance had collapsed back on me.

You can rest easy; superintelligent artificial intelligence like HAL 3000 and the Terminator will forever remain fiction. Speaking at a recent artificial intelligence seminar, Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo, research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said AI will never think for itself. "There are lots of very good sci-fi movies to watch on a Friday night," she said. "But there is not a shred of proper research that supports the idea that AI can become sentient. "This is technology that behaves as if it were intelligent, but that is nothing to do with creating or deducing.